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How CCM Can Help Your Urology Practice

Chronic Care Management, or CCM, helps practices maximize their revenue while offering preventative services to Medicare patients. But many urology providers remain confused about how to implement CCM or believe CCM is only for primary care doctors.

The good news? Your specialty practice can reap the benefits of Chronic Care Management, especially if you see patients more often than their primary care providers do. 

Here are six ways urology practices can offer additional patient care and bring in revenue through CCM. And if you’d like to learn more about CCM, check out ChartSpan’s complete breakdown of how a Chronic Care Management program works. 

1. Address recurring conditions, like UTIs, around the clock

Urology practices frequently deal with recurring conditions, like Urinary Tract Infections. If patients call your office about these conditions after-hours, they could wait all night before hearing back.

With Chronic Care Management, your patients have access to a 24/7 nurse line so they can immediately talk to someone and have their questions answered. And ChartSpan follows your preferences for how our nurses respond to specific conditions. 

For example, one urology practice let us know that patients could no longer see nurses for UTI symptoms. They needed to see a urology provider, their primary care provider, or an urgent care doctor. Our nurses told patients that, then notified the practice of the patient’s UTI. 

Another urology practice asked us to send patients diagnosed with chronic UTIs straight to the practice’s lab for a urinalysis test. We immediately began notifying the lab when those patients called and assured the patients we’d taken care of it. 

2. Find out about patients’ symptoms and offer care

With Chronic Care Management, the clinical team reaches out to patients monthly. This gives our nurses a chance to ask about urological symptoms, like increased frequency or urgency of voiding, incontinence, or dysuria. 

Because they perform check-ins so often, our clinical team can identify worrying symptoms early and report them to your practice. Your providers can then decide what type of care the patient needs. 

CCM also includes personalized healthcare plans to help patients manage their chronic conditions. For example, if a patient has a goal to increase water intake or to begin exercising three times a week, we can use CCM to check on their goals monthly instead of every 6 or 12 months.  

3. Provide your CCM patients with local resources

CCM can connect your patients to healthcare resources that go beyond your office, like physical therapy, transportation services, or pharmacies. 

For example, one urology practice asked ChartSpan to direct CCM patients to a local pelvic floor therapy center. 

We’ve also helped CCM patients:

• Arrange transportation to appointments and pharmacies
• Set up home delivery for prescriptions 
• Find local support groups or exercise groups

We know Social Determinants of Health, like healthy food, safe housing, clean water, consistent utilities, and emotional support have a strong impact on health outcomes. Through CCM, we can identify where patients have gaps in care or support and connect them to community resources that can help. 

4. Manage appointments, refills, and referrals, according to your preferences 

Patients can call the CCM nurse line for help with appointments, refills, or updating their records. If a patient contacts ChartSpan for any of those reasons, we will follow your practice’s guidelines when handling the patient’s requests.

Some practices love for us to call the pharmacy and check if the patient has refills, while others prefer we just notify one of their nurses. 

CCM services can also help with patient appointments. When a patient needs to see a provider, ChartSpan’s clinical team can do any of the following, depending on your preference:

• Call your patient appointment line
• Contact the person who handles appointments at your office directly 
• Ask the patient to make the appointment but leave a notification for your office

How a CCM service approaches appointments is entirely up to you, and ChartSpan will respect your preferences. 

5. Keep urology patient records and primary care records aligned

Since Chronic Care Management serves patients with multiple chronic conditions, the specialty practice and primary care practice must stay aligned. When working with a specialty practice, ChartSpan requests patient records from the primary care provider as often as the speciality practice requests. 

Although we focus our CCM services on the specialty practice’s concerns, our nurses need a complete picture of the patient’s health to ensure they’re doing well and don’t have conditions that could exacerbate each other. 

By checking primary-care records, our nurses and clinical staff can provide whole-person care for specialty practice patients. 

6. Bring in revenue

Chronic Care Management is an invaluable source of revenue for many specialty practices. With a CCM program, you can bill Medicare for monthly services for every enrolled patient. 

One of our urology practice clients managed to enroll over 2,000 eligible patients in CCM, resulting in more than $100,000 of additional revenue each month. When specialty practices make a profit from CCM, they can reinvest that money into paying nurses and practitioners, caring for their facilities, and serving their patients. 

Find Out How CCM Can Help Your Urology Practice

Chronic Care Management can help you manage recurring conditions like UTIs, keep track of patients’ symptoms, direct patients to resources, and even bring in revenue for your urology practice.

If you’d like to learn more about how Chronic Care Management can help Medicare patients, including patients at specialty practices, check out our complete CCM breakdown.